Digital Humanities

Thinking Activity: Digital Humanities

Hello Reader...

This blog is a part of Thinking Activity given by Dr.Dilip Barad sir to put emphasis on How digital Humanities helps in different fields to Learn Language and Literature through technology. It also explores extremely new  creative and Innovative ideas with new dimensions.

Definition of Digital Humanities...

 " Digital Humanities is an academic field concerned with the application of computational tools and methods to traditional humanities disciplines such as literature, history and philosophy".

  Digital Humanities means computer assisted literary study since the invention of computers, it knows only one language that is English. Thus English department and digital world are directly connected and digital technique can applied to other humanities field as well.

First try to understand the separate word… Digital means an electronic technology which generates, stores and processes data in terms of only two digits 1 and 0.


Humanities is a field of study, which analyses Human society and Culture. The Humanities include all Social Sciences, Language, Literature as well as politics or Religion, Any kind of Art or Music etc.. According to Matthew Kirschenbaum…


"The digital humanities today is a scholarship and pedagogy that are collaborative and depend on networks of people and that live an active 24-7 life online"


So, Digital Humanities is a wider field of study, research and scholarly activity, which makes interconnection between the digital world or technology or computing with discipline of Humanities. So Digital Humanities is Computer Assisted Literary Learning.


Digital Humanities is a kind of collaborative or interdisciplinary form of studying. It expanded the traditional form of communication and comprises the broad collection of information with the help of technology on one platform. Some of its facets are…


The preservation and sharing of collection which is very difficult to access or find.

The Fostering of new creative expression by use of digital media.

The use, analysis and creation of digital tools which can help in research or classroom.

" William Deresiewicz, Yale University professor wrote in Nation magazine (2008): ―The number of students studying English literature (for our purpose, let us read Gujarati, Hindi, Sanskrit literature), appears to be in a steep, prolongued and apparently irreversible decline. . . (it doesn‘t matter anymore where we may stand on questions of critical methods, canons, or ideologies) . . . the real story of academic literary criticism today is that the profession is, however slowly, dying.‖"

What is doing in English Department?

In our English department the live example of Digital Humanities. I am the student of English Department, MKBU university, Bhavnagar, Gujarat and I am studying under the guidance of Dilip Barad sir, Head of the English Department, MKBU university.

What is Digital Humanities and What is it doing in English Department" is a work by Matthew G. Kirchenbaum analyses why Digital Humanities flourished more in English Department rather than any other Department. Why the most influential field find Institutional home often as English Department.

First,  after numeric input,  text has been by far the most tractable data type for computers to manipulate.  Unlike images, audio, Video, and so on, there is a long tradition of text -based data processing that was within the capabilities of even some of the earliest computer systems and that has for decades fed research in fields like stylistics, linguistics, and author attribution studies, all heavily associated with English departments.

English is a Universal Language, Computer Language is all about Coding, so Coding started in English Language, So this is the first and foremost reason that Digital Humanities have more fair relations with English Departments.

Because of the Computer it has become very easy to input any text in Computer and can be accessed by the audience on a larger platform. Because of that Computer became integral part of English Department especially in Linguistic, Stylistic and Composition.

there is the long association between computer and composition, almost as long and just as rich in its lineage.
the pitch -perfect convergence between the intense conversation around editorial theory and mathod in the 1980s and the widespread means to implement electronic archives and editions very soon after; Jerome McGann is a key figure here,  with his work on the Rossetti Archive, which  he has repeatedly describe as a  vehicle for applied theory, standing as paradigmatic.

In Last two decades, means in the 21st Century we can see the rising interest in e-books, e-readers and in larger area-textual digitization projects demanding close connection between English Department, Reading and Textuality.

Thank you...